Kevin wrote:

I agree that having a DELTA-like degree of structure is a worthy goal, and I'm not excluding such a degree of structure from the proposed standard, just not requiring it as I keep saying. What I don't agree is that it's such an obvious gold standard that we should say "for a description to be regarded as a useful description, it MUST have this degree of structure".

This comes back to the question of fitness for purpose... as part of the specs we need to define what 'useful' is.... or maybe abstractly, define how we define 'useful'...

An unstructured blob of text might suit one particular need, but although containing all the appropriate information, might be totally useless for others.

I suppose I keep coming back to this: DELTA has just the degree of structure you wish for, it's been around for what, 30 years?, it's even been given the imprimatur as the "World Standard" already and - without putting too fine a point on it and calling a spade a bloody shovel - it hasn't worked as a standard.

It may have if people hadn't gone around ignoring it and inventing others... or if it and the suite of products based upon it had been flexible enough and responsive enough to accommodate what people wanted to do when they wanted to do it...

Now I suppose I'm going to get howls of protest over this, particularly from people who have been using DELTA for years, but I assay that it's true. The only reason that this discussion is taking place at all is that TDWG has realised for some time that DELTA as a standard hasn't worked well, and we need to be open about this.

My reading of the entrails at the time was the pressure to do the SDD thing was not that DELTA wasn't working, but rather that there were aggressively competing alternatives with champions working against each other inventing different an diverging mousetraps rather than collaborating to build a better one... SDD was an attempt to create an environment that would enable the definition of all descriptive data so it could be exchanged and shared by all the various application with minimal (zero?) information loss. It was to concentrate on data and data structure rather than the bells an whistles of applications and interfaces. We seem to be going in the right direction to do that...

One solution is to do the fixes to DELTA that have been proposed already (and have been in draft now for ten years or so) and XMLify it. But it seems to me that the main limitation of DELTA isn't simply that it isn't XML, or that it's not complex enough (heaven forbid), or some easily-fixable thing like that. It's more fundamental, and I suppose I'm exploring some sort of fundament at the moment. I think part of the basic problem is that it's tried to force too much structure and while this is a great promise it's been an impediment in practice. I may well be wrong about this, but I think there's something in it.

A definition/specification that can accommodate both approaches would be nice, but it is very unlikely that we will be able to fully resolve the internal tension between rigour/structure and freedom/flexibility. They are incompatible and even if we can formulate a specification to handle both approaches, at the end of the day people have to apply the specs, and some will be control freaks, some will be anarchists and others will be schizophrenic - it is difficult to imagine a real conduit between the extremes.

Perhaps I'm trying to play lawn tennis with a table-tennis net! Would that be fun? It'd certainly make it easier to get the bloody ball over the net so the game can go on...

and sometimes I get the impression the only thing common in the game is the grass - some are playing tennis on it (with or without a net), others are playing golf, others croquet, bowls, cricket, soccer, etc. But it is still only grass and we should be able to describe the stuff in some universally comprehensible fashion...

jim